Unionists in Ulster are fighting a losing battle against the tide of history

The violence that has once more erupted in loyalist districts of Northern Ireland is entirely typical of the last half-century. Every time change is introduced that affects the way in which Ulster is administered, the hardliners on the unionist side denounce it as further proof that the Protestant community is being sold down the river into the grey mists of an Irish Republic. 

And they are, of course, entirely right. It was in 1993 that the then Tory prime minister John Major, along with his Irish counterpart Albert Reynolds, issued the Downing Street Declaration, in which it was stated that “Britain has no selfish, strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”.

Imagine such a statement being made about Scotland, or Wales, or Northumberland. 

But while loyalists burn cars and shops and attack the police in defence of their right to be British, what good does it do them?

There was a revealing piece in the Irish Times on Monday by the widely-respected Ulster Unionist pundit Alex Kane. At every turn over the 50 years since the Troubles began, Kane pointed out, loyalists have sought to derail whichever political reform has been introduced or proposed by successive British and Irish governments, only to fail completely to change the direction in which events – and history – have subsequently moved. 

According to Kane, the anger felt this time round about the imposition of the Northern Ireland Protocol is especially bitter because Boris Johnson gave unionists his personal assurance that it would never happen. 

On 14 August last year, during a brief visit to the province, the Prime Minister assured unionists that “there will be no border down the Irish Sea”. Echoing his boast that he would lie down in front of the bulldozers before he approved a third runway at Heathrow, he added that such a customs barrier would be erected “over my dead body”. 

Two years previously, having resigned from Theresa May’s cabinet in order to pursue his hard Brexit strategy, he told the annual conference of the DUP that regulatory checks and customs controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would “damage the fabric” of the Union, leaving Northern Ireland behind “as an economic semi-colony of the EU”.

To tumultuous applause, he went on: “Now I have to tell you, no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.”

Three months later, he signed the trade deal between the UK and the EU which established exactly that. No wonder unionists felt betrayed.

But the truth is, unionists are always especially bitter and they always feel betrayed. They are never happy. They know they can’t afford to relax. Because the history that they see rolling out, piece by piece in front of their eyes, is not a history to which they can ever willingly subscribe. 

The Protocol is only the latest in a long line of disengagements by London from the idea of Northern Ireland being constitutionally a full part of the United Kingdom, “as British as Finchley”. You don’t have to support the idea of Irish unity to see this. Everybody can see it. The dogs in the street can see it. It has been the direction of travel since the old Stormont was abolished in 1972. Since then, we’ve had the Sunningdale Agreement, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Downing Street Declaration, the Good Friday Agreement and, now, a sea border that, post-Brexit, confirms NI as an annex of the European Union, overseen by the government in Dublin.  

Loyalists, and the DUP, have opposed all of these tooth and nail. The only battle won was against power-sharing in 1974, which has since been reinstalled and reinforced by statute. 

Unionists can’t win. And the time has come for them to take a long, hard look at themselves during which they work out how best to take their politics forward. Loyalist gangs can set fire to as many cars as they like. They can march up and down as many streets as they like, with colours flying and bands playing. They can take on the police as if their past history has been inverted, so that they are the rebels and the PSNI are the old RIC. But the next day, the same immutable facts will be staring them in the face. 

They could start by acknowledging that a few years from now they will be a minority in Northern Ireland. By 2030 or 2035, an estimated 52 per cent of the electorate will be Catholic, meaning that Sinn Fein and the SDLP can expect to win more seats than unionists in the Stormont Assembly. To compound unionist misery, an increasing number of Protestant voters – perhaps 20 per cent of the total, most of them under 40 – is opting these days for the Alliance and Green parties which, while nominally undeclared on the Union, have made it clear that they do not regard membership of the UK as the sine qua non of government. 

It won’t be easy. For a start, the most extreme loyalist organisations are now, in the main, criminal organisations, deeply involved in racketeering and racism. Where once they regarded killing random Catholics and family members of the IRA as their mainstream activity, with drugs and prostitution on the side, these days their baseball bats are more often drawn against each other and anyone else who stands in their way.  

The riots that have made the headlines in recent weeks haven’t involved the paramilitaries directly. They like to maintain the pretence that they have gone legit in both business and community terms. Instead, they have put the word out that knee-cappings and punishment beatings have been suspended pending the resolution of the NI Protocol and other outstanding issues. The main participants in the street battles have thus been adolescent boys, some as young as 12. 

Taking their lead from the men in balaclavas, with whom they have remained in close contact as events have unfolded, the DUP has been careful not to denounce the teenage uprising as anything more than high jinks – perhaps a tad excessive, but entirely understandable. 

Take the reaction of Arlene Foster, the DUP leader and First Minister at Stormont. What did she have to say as petrol bombs were rained down on the police force whose chief constable she has demanded should resign for failing to prosecute those attending Republican funerals in defiance of Covid restrictions? 

“I appeal to our young people,” she said, “not to get drawn into disorder which will lead to them having criminal convictions and blighting their own lives. I also ask parents to play their part and be proactive in protecting their young adults.”

“Drawn in”, “protected”, “blighted lives”. Honeyed words from Foster. If the rioters had been nationalists, she would have issued a straight-down-the-middle condemnation of disgraceful criminal behaviour. 

What unionists desperately need is a common cause that is more than simply building barricades against the march of history. They need their own Canute, their own De Gaulle, their own De Klerk – a leader who can negotiate an agreed future for them that conserves as much as possible of their strength and dignity. But that would require them to see politics as primarily about how the country should be governed, not under which flag, and that is beyond them, just as it is beyond Sinn Fein to see events in Northern Ireland through any other prism than that of Irish unity. The difference is that unionists are losing and the rebels are winning. For them, it is just a matter of time. 

Louis MacNeice got it right: 

The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever, 

But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.